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    "localId": "7367434",
    "label": "Memorandum for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger Regarding Communist Military Aid to North Vietnam",
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    "title": "Memorandum for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger Regarding Communist Military Aid to North Vietnam",
    "citationUrl": "https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7367434",
    "identifierLocal": "032400075-001",
    "collections": [
        "Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific (Ford Administration)",
        "East Asia and Pacific Country Files"
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    "productionDates": [
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            "day": 26,
            "logicalDate": "1975-02-26",
            "month": 2,
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    "seq": 1,
    "pageIndex": 0,
    "type": "photo",
    "url": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/34/3674/7367434/content/arcmedia/presidential-libraries/ford/gallery/032400075-001_Page_2.jpg",
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    "ocrText": "Digitized from Box 19 of the NSA. Presidential Country Files: East Asia and the Pacific at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library\nSECRET\n2\nAnalysts are generally quite conservative and will usually not go beyond\nthe available data base, no matter how small it might be. In essence this\nnew paper, in addition to hurting our case, gives Congress less reliable\nfigures than did the first one. Moreover, what really counts most are the\ngoods delivered. That it costs us more to ship military hardware to\nVietnam than it costs the Soviets, for example, is no help to the South\nVietnamese and probably of little interest to Congress.\nWe want to go back to square one. The costs will at least be comparable\nin some ways. We recommend that Congress be sent the military aid\nfigures in Tab A, which are based on Communist prices (though using\nthe recalculated ammunition figures in Tab B which lower the Communist\ncost $50 million based on a reassessment of U. S. equivalent costs). The\npaper for Congress should also make clear that these are commodity costs\nand should be compared with our commodity costs not with total aid.\nThis leaves us with $295 million (DRV) versus $337. 5 million (GVN).\nWe should also tell the Congress that we simply cannot produce even\npartially reliable figures on the remainder of Communist military aid,\nthough we guess that the Communist total might be less than our total\nbecause, for example, our transport and handling costs are higher. The\npaper would explain why the GVN needs more military aid than does the\nDRV.\nAs you know, we face two basic problems in dealing with these figures:\nfirst, everybody trys to manipulate the figures to suit their own political\npurposes while accusing others of doing the same; a calculation based\non commodity prices is still far from perfect, but it at least compares\nthings that can be roughly compared, even though our opposition will\nobviously try to contrast the Communist commodity aid figures against\nour overall aid total. Second, there is what we might call the Sihanoukville\nsyndrone. CIA will not say anything which it cannot prove. At a time\nof declining intelligence capacity in Southeast Asia, this means that they\nare probably underestimating Communist aid to the DRV just as they\nonce underestimated the importance of Sihanoukville as a transit point.\nBut we have to live with that reality even though it clearly leads not only\nto political problems but also to the production of figures that tend to\nmislead the Congress and (when they are promptly leaked) everybody\nelse.\nThe commodity figures, which include equipment, ammunition, and\nweaponry, are still not accurate, but we think they are the best we can\nuse under the circumstances.\nFORD\na\nSECRET\nONEY\nJORAS"
}